Danbury again named safest city in Connecticut

Libor Jany

Updated 10:21 pm, Wednesday, March 13, 2013

DANBURY -- Continuing a recent trend, Danbury has again been named the safest city in Connecticut, according to an annual list compiled by CQ Press.

The rankings are calculated from crime statistics -- including the number of murders, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries and motor vehicle thefts -- from cities of at least 75,000 people that reported crime data to the FBI in 2012.

Danbury has long had a reputation as a safe community, in part, because of the city's low unemployment rate, said Mayor Mark Boughton.

"Unemployment rate is joined right on the hip of our crime rate," he said, adding that the next safest city was Stamford.

Violent crime is down in Danbury, the state's seventh-largest city, with a population of nearly 80,000. Authorities attribute that in part to the proliferation of surveillance technologies, such as license plate readers and security cameras.

Reported rapes fell 31 percent, robberies 41 percent and burglaries 16 percent from 2011 to 2012. The number of assaults remained relatively the same, and there was a slight uptick in thefts, motor vehicle thefts and arsons.

The decline in crime in Danbury reflects a national trend, though there is less of a consensus among criminologists on a national level about what socioeconomic factors precipitated the drop.

"That's a big part of that equation. We're very fortunate here in Danbury, because have the public trust," Danbury police Chief Al Baker said by telephone Wednesday. "We have clean government, we have a good education system, we have a very involved community. Fortunately the economy's not as bad here as it is in the rest of Connecticut."

Baker said that city and law enforcement officials have considered installing security cameras on Spring Street, one of the city's most active drug corridors.

Boughton said, "We're doing a lot with some of the smaller infractions. I think that sends the message much louder: you know if you can't get away with something small, then you're not going to get away with something bigger."

In the past, some experts have questioned the reliability of crime statistics released by the FBI because of problems with reporting and measuring the data. Boughton said that analyzing the data, flawed or not, can give law enforcement officials a clearer picture of crime in their cities.